The Daily Mail, the Guardian and the Mirror’s national titles saw their websites’ daily traffic figures slip between February and March, as rivals the Telegraph and the Independent made up ground.

Mail Online remains the biggest UK national newspaper on the web despite dropping more than 5% of its daily unique browsers to fall back below 14 million, according to the latest figures from the Audit Bureau of Circulations.

Recent changes by Mail Online to its appearance on mobile devices should allow it to avoid expected damage from changes to the Google algorithm which penalise sites not optimised for smaller screens.

theguardian.com saw a far smaller fall, slipping by less than 1% to an average of 7.3 million daily unique browsers.

Across the whole month, Mail Online attracted 220 million unique browsers, while theguardian.com pulled in 127m.

theguardian.com gets about a third of its readers from the UK, making it slightly more international than Mail Online, which gets almost 40% of its audience domestically. With UK audiences likely to be especially valuable in the runnup to a hotly contested election, that gives theguardian.com 2.7 million unique browsers in the UK each day, compared with 5.5 million for MailOnline.

Both websites had seen month-on-month increases in browsers of about 5% in February, even as all the other UK national newspaper websites saw uniques fall.

However, in March, the Telegraph increased its number of daily unique browsers by 2.4% to 4.1 million, while the Independent grew by 3.5% to 2.5 million.

The Telegraph does not provide a daily breakdown by geography, but almost 60% of its monthly unique browsers – more than 32 million – are in the UK. That compares with more than 39 million for theguardian.com.

Metro also saw a reversal in fortunes, racking up the largest increase of the nationals in increasing its average uniques by more than 6% to hit 1.2 million.

In contrast, the Mirror’s national titles recorded a 3.6% fall to 3.8 million and the Daily Express saw browsers fall by 1.8% to 823,652.